


Ships That Don't Always Come In

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Angst, Coming Out, Friendship, Gen, Internalized Homophobia, Period-Typical Homophobia, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-20 04:46:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19986334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Peggy knows him a little too well, sometimes.





	Ships That Don't Always Come In

**Author's Note:**

  * For [glorious_spoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/gifts).



> For the prompt: _Jack/OMC, maybe with bonus Jack & Peggy brotp?_

Jack was careful. Jack was _god damn_ careful. He'd spent most of his life, in fact, with no one around him catching a clue, not even men as sharp as Dooley or Vernon. He knew all the little tricks and tells, how to flirt with women and game-play around the office, all the right things to say in the locker room and at the bar.

As far as anyone was concerned, Jack Thompson was a healthy red-blooded American man with healthy urges and a modest tendency to brag when you got a few whiskeys in him. Sure, he hadn't settled down yet, but he was still playing the field.

(And he was, he _was_ , in back alley bars and dockside dives, grabbing with greedy, stealthy hunger for a kiss, for release, for a few all too short moments of skin-on-skin warmth. Was this was most men felt in the marriage bed? Lucky goddamn bastards.)

But he wasn't in danger of falling in love. Not ... like _that._ Like men and women did. Men didn't ... didn't feel that (and he turned a deliberately blind eye to the couples in some of those bars, swaying on the dance floor, lost in each other). What he felt was a temporary thing, the way he'd known men in the war who grabbed for each other at night and disavowed it by the light of day. He'd meet the right girl someday.

Instead he met Alan, and he found out what it was like to get swept away: in careless nights, in _criminally_ careless days, in the startling discovery that you really _could_ get so wrapped up in another person that all you could do was think about the touch of their skin and their freckles and your own yearning to hear their voice again.

"Jack, we can't keep doing this, my wife -- she's threatened to take the kids and move to her mom's place in Jersey if we -- Jack, dammit, it doesn't have to stop, it's just ... we can't see as much of each other, and the lunches have to stop -- _Jack_ \--"

*

He couldn't even really blame Carter, because he did, after all, sign her paychecks to investigate mysteries. It was a cold bit of irony that made him smile slightly -- or maybe that was only the most of a bottle of cheap whiskey already inside him, as Peggy climbed up onto the breakwater to sit next to him, swinging her legs in her sensible shoes and stockings.

"Not even going to ask for a drink?" he said. It came out bitter and nasty. He hoped she'd take the hint, and just leave.

"I would love one, if you're offering."

He gave her the bottle, instead of throwing it to shatter beneath them where the dark waves raked the rocks and rubble that made up the Hudson River shore. There were times when he was so angry that he didn't know what to do with all this anger, so he put a smile on it, like he always did. Put a smile on it, and clenched his fists on the breakwater, and swallowed it down and made it part of him.

He'd hit Alan, during that last fight. Left a red mark on his cheek that Jack knew was going to swell up into a bruise; he knew all too well the subtle dance of fists on bodies. Was left with Alan's betrayed look as his last memory of the man who'd gone back to his wife and kids, apparently.

"Jack," Peggy said, passing back the bottle, "have I ever told you how close I came to marrying, back in '41?"

"Oh, yes? You mean we were almost spared Agent Peggy Carter for Peggy Carter, mother and housewife?"

It was nasty and it was cruel and he didn't care. And Peggy just smiled slightly in the reflected lights off the water.

"You were indeed. Fred Wells, was his name. Quite a boring chap, really. Had a deferment from the war to work in the censorship office, marking papers. I thought he hung the moon. My brother nearly came to blows with him at our engagement party."

The brother. M. Carter. Jack grimaced and took a long swig from the bottle. "So you backed down from Brother?" He tsked at her, and tried not to think about weddings, and the fact that his bride's face under the veil had always been a blur he couldn't ever make out. "Shame. I wouldn't have thought it of you."

"Bite your _tongue,_ Jack Thompson, of course I didn't," Peggy said, taking the bottle back. "I expect you can guess how pliant and responsible I was about being lectured on my marital choices by an older male relative."

Jack barked a harsh laugh. She still had the bottle, so he lit a cigarette instead, and offered it to her. Peggy shook her head. It was one of the oddly womanish quirks about her; she did not like to smoke.

"No, Michael and I had quite the row, and he had a row with my father for upsetting me, and then he went back to the front, and --" She took a breath. "We got the telegram three months later. The last thing I ever said to him, I believe, was _It's my life, Michael, not yours._ Or words to that effect. And I suppose I was not wrong about that."

Jack wasn't sure what to say. This was ... something he'd known, in the broad strokes. Peggy had lost her brother in the war. But he hadn't known it like _this_ before, not with this brutally clear picture in his head of a younger, softer Peggy, holding a telegram like a snake that would bite her.

He'd lost friends (... _friends_ ) in the war. But he hadn't lost family. That was, he thought, a particular cut that he had been spared through his simple lack of siblings.

"Anyway," Peggy said, with that certain brisk tilt to her head, "I broke off the engagement with Fred straightaway, of course. Oh, I loved him, I suppose. For most young ladies, that would have been enough. I wondered, sometimes, what was wrong with me, that for me it was not. I was fortunate, I now know, to have met Steve, who helped me realize that it was Fred, not me. Fred, and my parents, and ... the world, you might say. After all, I knew many young men who had pictures of their sweethearts back home. Their lovers would not have jilted them for going off to war. Fred ... the best I could do was loose those ties rather than expecting him to wait for me. The last I heard, he was married to a young lady from a nice family, with one baby already and another on the way. I expect his wife stays home to keep the house. I certainly should have been glad to, at the time."

"And is there a _point_ to all of this, Carter?" Jack said, when he could finally fit a word edgewise into her cascade of marital nattering.

"Only this," she said, and closed a strong, warm hand over his wrist. "The people we love do not always love us as we might wish them to, and we do not always love ourselves as we ought, but Jack, it doesn't mean there isn't someone out there for you who _will_ see you properly."

"A bride for every returned war hero," Jack snarled. He'd certainly heard it often enough; he'd never wanted to hear it from her.

"Jack ... I didn't say a bride, did I?"

And he looked at her, really looked at her, through a haze of cigarette smoke and alcohol, her dark-eyed gaze steady on his ... and it hit him right down to his bones with the force of a hurricane: _how long had she known?_ and _why hadn't she said anything?_ and _was she going to go on not saying anything?_ and _she could ruin him, ruin him ..._

While he was still staring at her, she gave his arm a tug, reminding him that Peggy was pretty goddamn strong and he'd never arm-wrestled her for fear he might lose. "Come on, Jack. Let's take a short walk to work off a little of that bourbon, just back to the car, and perhaps then you might think about getting some sleep."

"You don't --" he said, pulling his arm away, "-- know what I -- Peggy, you can't go on about a wedding and -- _Peggy_ \--"

He was furious, and he didn't even know why, only so furious with an alcohol-fueled rage that he could hardly think -- the same fury that had made him bruise Alan's face, the same rage that had pushed him out here to the end of the land, as far as you could go, but there just was nowhere _to_ go --

"Don't forget, Jack," she said, still with her hands on his, not afraid at all. "... I came to know you, in time. Someone else will, too. Come get some _sleep_ , Jack. We can talk about this tomorrow if you want to. Tonight, just sleep."

And he came.


End file.
